Yes, Sony did it: today, it unveiled an 8in netbook - or "ultra-portable PC", as the consumer electronics giant would rather you called it. It also used the term "lifestyle PC".
Sony Vaio P
Sony's Vaip P: 'lifestyle PC' not netbook
Say hello to the Vaio P, a 640g mini laptop with a surprisingly better-than-netbook spec. …

Battery

I can see why they avoid the netbook term as it's hardly a netbook if official claims are only 4 hours battery life. Very poor for a netbook, especially at such a high premium price (which is higher still when you have to buy proprietary peripherals as Sony like to lock you into their products).

Will you be able to transfer a Blu-Ray you have purchased to this to watch on the move? I very much doubt it. Sony will probably come up with yet another proprietary DRM format, this time a download format launched on a iTunes-like service and charged at a premium (pay per view even).

nice ...but....

A real Vaio ...

This is more like it - a proper Vaio. Not just another expensive notebook but something dinky and novel. Nicer if that "1.6 GHz CPU" actually 2GHz, but the rest looks good. And in truth £595 is not bad - early Vaios cost 2 grand+ for (obviously) much less spec.

Hardware looks good, price is okay...

but 2G RAM + weak processor/graphics combo + Vista = fail. Shame - I seriously might have bought one with XP. But MS won't license it to machines with more than 1GB RAM. Still, what's the point in having a monopoly if you don't abuse it, eh?

Great!

To pre-empt the ranting...

...yes, it's a very high resolution screen (although not as high as, say, the Touch HD) with an odd aspect ratio. No, it's not the obvious choice for playing videos, and if you try to read it from three feet away with default font sizes, you may struggle. This does not make it pointless, it makes it exactly what I was looking for when I was struggling to program on a mini-note 2133 recently (I couldn't fit a useful amount of code on the screen).

I'm plenty not-fond of Sony as a company for many things, but kudos to them for producing something that a small proportion of the market would find damned useful. I'll be saving up.

Close, but I won't be buying...

I like the screen, and I'd probably be able to live with that irritating keyboard nubbin mouse, but there are some other issues.

Lack of an Ethernet port is no good really. Sony should have called this thing the Vaio Air. The fact is that I probably won't have an 802.11N network for a while, and even when I do, it won't be nearly as fast as the gigabit port on my HP2133 (or probably even as fast as the piddly Via cpu bottleneck will allow an nfs copy to go.) They'll probably supply ethernet via a docking station that goes in that proprietary port.

Mostly, though, I just seriously doubt that Linux will work on this device at all. Sony has historically done things in as proprietary and bizzare a way as possible, so you more or less have to run Windows and use all the Sony software. Who knows if you'd even be able to run XP.

So I guess I'll just wait for that HP2140, since it's so cheap I can justify replacing my 2133 after a year... especially if I can get the damned video drivers to work properly.

Very cool device indeed!

lovely...

I had a play on one of these on friday at a trade show... I liked the look when i saw hthe CES preview... and im inlove now that ive used it for real! Vista, yes bloaty and a bit much for the atom, but... its not overly bad! the screen! WOW! crisp isnt the word for it! but the res does make for eyesquinting joy! text is miniscule!

build is tops... head and shoulders above any netbook... and the keyboard is almost full size! £600 is a lot for a netbook clone... but this isnt one of those! yes it has netbookish specs, but its more than that! when 'she' isnt looking i would like to make one mine!!! :)